Raspberry Pi Emulator Setup

Resources

1. http://39digits.com/build-a-nintendo-emulator-using-a-raspberry-pi-2/
2. http://www.emuparadise.me/ (for roms)
3. https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki
4. https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/scraper (on how to scrape games, can go through setup or ssh into pi)

Setup the Card

1. create a folder Retropie in downloads or in some place that you want to store this. It could also be ~/Dropbox/RetroPie
2. Download retro pi from https://retropie.org.uk/download/ and place it in Retropie
3. unpack the file with gunzip retropie..img.gz
4. Place the SD card into the mac
5. Check that you can see the SD card by typing diskutil list. More than likely, it will be listed as /dev/disk2 .
6. Important verify the disk number
7. Unmount the disk with diskutil unmountdisk disk2 where disk2 is the disk found with diskutil list
8. Navigate to where the RetroPie image file was unpacked (it's an .img file) and run the command

sudo dd if=retropie-v3.0beta2-rpi2.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m

where

• if = Input File
• of = Output File
• bs = Block size

IMPORTANT = the file in if=xxxx is the retropie image file.

See the commands at the blog referenced above about what this command does.

While the command is running, you can use Ctrl-T to get the progress

Setup the Pi

1. Setup the Pi with the SD card, the case, and the USB keyboard for some configuration. Use the HDMI slot to connect to the tv.
2. Power on the Pi and plug in the controller
3. Setup the buttons for the controller

• You can skip an option by holding a button. Read the screen.

1. Setup wifi
2. Setup audio to be via HDMI
3. On the Retropie screen, choose the raspi-config which will bring up a screen that needs the keyboard.
4. The article says to overclock, but Pi 3 didn't allow it
5. Select the option to expand the filesystem. After selected, it will ask to reboot, and reboot the device.

Transfer games

Now that pi is up and running with RetroPie as the OS, we can connect to it via our network. View the IP address of the Pi via RetroPie, and verify that you see it on the network via terminal with the command arp -a.

Verify that you can ping the device with ping 10.0.0.19 where the IP address was found with arp -a.

Use Cyberduck app to connect via SFTP with the following credentials:

• Username = pi
• Password = raspberry

We can also use these same credentials to ssh into the Pi with

ssh pi@10.0.0.19

With CyberDuck, you should see two folders. We will be adding ROM to RetroPie under the /roms directory in the appropriate emulator folder. For example, add Nintendo Entertainment System games under /home/RetroPie/roms/nes.

View the RetroPie Github tutorial pages to verify the proper file extensions that the emulators contained in RetroPie are looking for.

After placing ROMs on the device, we need to restart RetroPie. This can be done via RetroPie, and hitting Start Button on Controller > Quit > Restart System

Scraping Game Info

1. Retropie
2. Hit Start, and select scraper
3. Optionally, select the systems, and the other settings (like only missing games)
4. Walks through the scraping process, not all games will be found

Tips

• Start + Select will get back to the retropie menu when playing a game

Advanced Setup

• Use Wireless controllers via the Github tutorials
• Look at scraping the game covers via Retropie tutorials and the utilit found on the device.
• As found in the blog post above, there are a number of .cfg config files that can be used to tweak the performance of the emulators, and even each game. View the post for details.
• To change the config for each game, while it is loading, use the keyboard and hit x to see configs for the game